Title: Ajax and PHP: Building Responsive Web Applications

Cristian Darie
Bogdan Brinzarea
Mihai Bucica
Filip Chereches-Tosa

Manuel Lemos
manuellemos.netDespite it is not exactly a new thing, AJAX is still the hot topic of the moment.

Many Javascript libraries have been developed to assist in the implementation of AJAX and dynamic HTML based solutions to provide better Web user experience.

Most of such Javascript libraries are great, but usually they only solve half of the problem. The other half must be solved by server side software written in languages like PHP.

AJAX and PHP is an interesting book that addresses both halves of the problem of developing AJAX enhanced PHP applications.

The book subtitle is building responsive Web applications, but using AJAX and DHTML is more than just that.

The objective is to make Web based user interfaces more predictable and easier to learn, so the users can be more productive and achieve their goals faster.

One of the ways to make the users more productive is to make Web applications that use the same user interface metaphors of desktop applications.

The users in general are already familiar with those metaphors and understand them quite well. Therefore, using the desktop application metaphors in Web based applications makes the users more productive, as they need to learn less to perform their goals.

This book has several chapters dedicated to the implementation of several user interface metaphors and other common solutions for improving the user interfaces of Web applications using AJAX, DHTML and PHP.

These chapters provide practical implementations of AJAX based form validation, chat system, drag and drop, auto-completing text inputs, real time charts using SVG, data grids, RSS reader, and drag and drop.

Each of these chapters is usually divided in two parts: an introduction and a sample implementation. This is a very good hands on approach that helps developers understand the problem, the solution and how to adapt it to their own applications.

For most developers not yet well aware of the AJAX related subjects, these practical implementation chapters would be hard to understand without the introduction of several base concepts.

The books starts with three chapters exactly intended to introduce all the important base concepts that the developers must understand before proceeding.

These chapters introduce important concepts such as the Document Object Model (DOM) and its relation with HTML pages, CSS styles, Javascript events, the XMLHttpRequest object, and the interaction between the browser and Web server running PHP and MySQL or other databases.

Overall, this book provides a very good hands on approach to build Web applications enhanced with AJAX and DHTML based techniques. You will find this book very useful, in particular if you are interested in using AJAX solutions immediately in your PHP applications, or you are interested in learning these techniques to adapt and integrate with the PHP Web application framework of your choice.